


Survival

by Jake_the_space_cat



Series: A Creature of Pride (transmasc!Kim AU) [4]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: CW for Brief Mention of Cutting, Cats, Class Differences, Class Issues, Cop Culture, Coping, Gen, Grief, Grieving, Loss, OD Death, Pre-Canon, Precinct 57, Trans Kim Kitsuragi, Trans Male Character, also pockets I did write one happy fic about pockets, drug overdose, i guess, partners, pockets are great, so I just write things about grieving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29892054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jake_the_space_cat/pseuds/Jake_the_space_cat
Summary: Don't think of it as your partner. Think of it as 'the body.'Eyes didn't come to work. He won't answer the phone. He won't come to the door. Kim knows what he'll find when he breaks into the silent apartment.CW for drug overdose death and brief mention of self-harm (not on Kim's part!).
Series: A Creature of Pride (transmasc!Kim AU) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2160411
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	Survival

**Author's Note:**

> Luc is Eyes' actual name, in this AU.
> 
> As usual, this fits in between pieces I've already written, because planning and writing in chronological order are beyond me. (I've got [a masterlist of chronology for all of my DE pieces here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Mfej90pwfLsLANPI3nuLRqnoAc8u3DW1vgy3icTK-w/edit#gid=0).)
> 
> I also was/am still sick as I write/post this, so fingers crossed it makes sense!

_This is second nature. Don’t hesitate. Don’t think about the person it might have been. Don’t try to pick apart the long string of events and conditions that led to this particular collapse of the human body and mind._

_Start the process. Administer the Stations of Breath._

Kim does so. Ho does not go on to the next step - examining the body for time and cause of death, though the former is easy to guess and the latter obvious. This one time, he will leave those pieces of the ritual to someone else. The station can send in officers who knew Luc in passing but who did not know him well - officers who will treat the body with respect but who will not run the risk of falling into the expanding white silence of protective dissociation as they work. 

Kim rests a hand on the bed, looks down at the uncanny valley of the body’s face, familiar and alien both. Feels the threatening weight of failure and regret.

_Shh. No. There is no guilt here. On his part, or on yours. Accept that. Believe it. You’ve been here before. You know it’s the only thing that will save you. Believe that this death was inevitable._

_All officers’ deaths are inevitable. Here is the only place where we cede control. Here is the only place where no one was at fault. There is nothing we could have done. In the face of an officer’s death, we are united in our helplessness. Here is where we are the RCM, and we stand as one knowing that this death could be our own._

Kim covers the body with a light sheet. Pyr ODs are usually found naked, stripped down to relieve the heat users feel as they lose the ability to regulate their body temperature. This OD is no exception.

He unplugs the projector in the corner. The sound of the played-out reel of film flapping as it spins is too loud in the small space. The projector is aimed at the ceiling. The film likely shows patterns of light on water, traffic at night sped up so the headlights blur into long lines, the undulating progress of the northern lights. Pyr addicts have predictable tastes.

He steps out of the bedroom. Closes the door behind him, quietly and carefully. As though Luc could still be disturbed.

In his mind, he sees himself leaning back against the door. Sliding down it. Sitting with his head on his knees. Falling out of time.

_That’s the worst thing you can do. If you’ve abandoned routine, then at least keep in motion. Stay in the moment. Stay outside of your own head._

He hesitates. 

_No, don’t--_

This is the last time, he promises himself. He will never review these thoughts again. It’s not as though he hasn’t lived with them, acted on them, tried to convince Luc of them, for most of the past year. 

Some people can’t survive being cops. Even people who’ve put in eighteen years with the RCM, four of them in homicide. Even people who are very good at their jobs. Even people everyone likes and respects. Some people are killing themselves as you watch. 

Some people, those incredibly rare RCM officers with savings and a college degree, the unimaginable head start of growing up in an upper-middle-class family--those people could have gotten out. And survived.

If they’d listened.

If they hadn’t been determined to deny they had options.

_There. You’ve gotten that out of the way. It can’t help him now, and it won’t help you. Keep moving._

There’s a shoebox in a pile of trash in the corner. Kim retrieves it. Goes to the bookshelf along one wall. Classics, titles he recognizes but few he’s read. Slim books of poetry--pieces like glass you turn in your fingers, sharp-edged, Luc had called them. Poems that focused you. _Poems like cutting,_ Luc had said once, and Kim had added that to his list of evidence that, yes, he should be concerned about his partner.

And here and there, stacked sideways along the tops of the other books--romance novels. 

Luc read them to keep up with his sister. They were her favorite genre, and at some point when they were kids, he’d started snatching the ones she particularly cherished, reading them just so he could give her shit about them. She’d reciprocated by stealing his Portnov and Bergenhoff and calling him out for being a pretentious ass. They’d kept it up as adults.

\--------

"A great way to waste money," Luc had said. "Paying interisolary call rates just to share the newest additions in my ever-growing--" He'd given Kim a sidelong smirk. "--Compendium of Creative Cognates for Cocks."

Kim had barely managed to keep a straight face.

"Detective, I don't believe that's the proper use of ‘cognate.’"

\--------

He stacks the romance novels in the shoebox. There aren’t many - Luc must have only kept the worst. Or the best. Maybe the criteria are the same for either. _Two Dukes for a Duchess, How to Catch a Corsair, Powerplay, Waking the Würm, Fair Ladies and Their Lords_ … Many of the covers are painfully heterosexual clinches and swoons, but a few are more subdued and their spines show it’s suggested they be filed under “literature” in stores. Some of them feature collages of police MCs and crime scene tape and dark silhouettes. Kim flips one over and reads the back. Standard thriller blurb, but the bodyguard is a woman and the man she’s assigned to protect is a dangerously attractive reformed criminal. She’ll have to break through his cold facade in order to _truly_ protect him.

_That’s the last thing you want to do, if you want to protect anyone. Including yourself. Fiction never does get anything right._

He’ll take these down to his MC and then call in the body. These have no bearing on why Luc is lying dead in the next room. People who knew him well wouldn’t make jokes, but others might. He wasn’t queer (though Kim had wondered at first); he wasn’t a weak, sentimental “pussy.” But cop culture means someone will have to make the inevitable cracks. Better if the books just aren’t here to trigger them.

He can only hope Luc wasn’t being literal about the Compendium of Creative Cognates for Cocks. He’s not going through a dead man’s belongings looking for _that._

Kim sighs. 

_And that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t run through your head when you’re dealing with the body of some stranger, DOA. That’s the kind of thing you shouldn’t know about a body’s belongings. Not if you want to stay sane._

Right. He’ll take these down, put them under the seat, call in the body. Let momentum take over.

A soft scratching at the other side of the closed bedroom door and a low, plaintive call interrupt his plans.

A deeper sigh, and Kim does let himself lean his forehead against the bookcase for one second. 

_Just_ one _second. You’ve held still too long. Any longer introduces the possibility of experiencing grief now, when this isn’t the time or place for it._

Okay. He’ll take the cat down, too. Soon there’ll be enough repressed emotion in this room to charge the air almost to sparking; no point in having an animal in the middle of that. 

He’s never had pets. What does a cat need? Where the hell would Luc keep its...carrying case? 

That’s not right. That can’t be the right phrase.

_And there we go. That’s one too many pauses. One too many open-ended questions. Welcome to that common ground where no one knows anything about anything. Where procedure and routines don’t exist. Where you’re just another person asking meaningless questions and trying to imagine what a body would think or want._

Carrier. It’s called a carrier. Or a crate?

 _Fuck, Kitsuragi. You_ are _going to cry._


End file.
